Baaghi 4 Review: Fourth Baaghi Is Strictly For Tiger Shroff Fans

Producer Sajid Nadiadwala returns after a five-year hiatus with his nearly one-decade-old action franchise, which is perhaps like no other in the world. All the films in the series, including the one being reviewed here, are standalone ventures with Tiger Shroff in the guise of an overly belligerent rebel being the only common link between them.  

Baaghi 4 foists upon us more of what the franchise has done before in abundance - gratuitous violence - in order to peddle a brand of toxic masculinity that the world can certainly do without.  

Shroff, of course, has the chops to plunge headlong, with his action hero poise intact, into spitfire sequences and give them all he has - and then some. But what can an actor do when what is on paper is only superficially visceral and does not pack the sort of punch that can inject some credibility into the protagonist's exploits.       

Like the previous three entries in the series, Baaghi 4, an A-rated movie on account of the excessive gore on show, is an unacknowledged and loose remake of a South Indian film about a man who goes completely berserk and suffers repeated meltdowns after sustaining serious injuries and losing his girlfriend in a road accident.  

It effects sufficient tweaks in the plot for the story and screenplay to be credited to producer Sajid Nadiadwala, who had no reason not to bankroll the fourth instalment of the franchise. The first three, released in 2016, 2018 and 2020 respectively, delivered solid bang for every buck that was spent on them.  

The advent of Baaghi 4 was inevitable. If you are looking for a positive, let's say this: it is mounted and filmed with a semblance of flair. If only it had a stronger script to go with all the vim and vigour, it might have been a somewhat different story.     

A suitably brawny Tiger Shroff plays Ronny Pratap Singh again but this time around he is an officer of what is called the "Defence Sea Force".  Before his life takes a turn for the worse, he asserts that his blood boils when he sees injustice anywhere - in the street or in the country at large.  

After a near-death experience pushes him over the precipice and into a protracted coma, he emerges from the hospital seven months later haunted by memories of the girl he lived for, orphan-turned-doctor Alisha D'Souza (Bollywood debutant Harnaaz Sandhu).  

Everybody around the psychologically disturbed and emotionally fragile Ronny, including his elder brother Jeetu (Shreyas Talpade), tries to impress upon him that the woman he believes he has tragically lost never really existed.  

The hows and wherefores of the young man's struggles with the subterfuge and his recollections of the truth forms the crux of a flimsy plot that has more gaping holes than passable narrative chunks.  

The film is directed by Bollywood newbie A Harsha (who has a slew of Kannada hits and a Telugu blockbuster behind him), but Baaghi 4 is more an action choreographer's movie than his. 

Sanjay Dutt plays the villain, a man called Chacko, who is more angularly flippant than genuinely menacing. He surfaces late in the film. The screenplay apportions a long passage to the story of how Chacko turned from a mere bad man to an inveterate fiend.  

One might ask: what's love got to do with this evil man's sinking to his nadir? Turns out that mohabbat and nafrat are but two sides of the same coin in the monster's lexicon and takes an invincible one-man army to fix matters for the well-being of the world. 

Two love stories work at cross-purposes out here but the pair of women in the mix, notwithstanding the generous screen time accorded to them, are secondary figures, if not just spectators. The two ladies - the other being a sex worker with an acute sense of morality (Sonam Bajwa) - get their share of the action.  

One of them even spouts: "Mohabbat mein aurat se koi jeet nahin sakta aur nafrat mein usse koi hara nahin sakta (Nobody can win against a woman in love and nobody can defeat a woman who hates)." But the men in this movie outdo the girls by miles in both love and spite. 

The villain and his brother (Saurabh Sachdeva) do their best to erase the hero's memory as he fights to cling to his sanity. The police, led by a crooked, corrupt man who never wears the uniform (Upendra Limaye), are out to nab Ronny and prove that his deceased beloved is only a figment of his imagination.  

That isn't as confounding as it may sound, but it is tortuously tedious for the most part. Scenes come and go, a lot of blood is spilled and angry words and scowls are traded. All the talk of love and loyalty that the men engage is lost in a pool of unending bluster and laboured emotions.     

In one scene, the hero receives electric shock treatment. He shouts his lungs out all right but does not yield an inch of ground to the bad guys. At the end of the ordeal, he has the strength and gumption to stand erect and pipe up: "Yeh jo tumhara torture hai mera warm-up hai."  

While you might want to tell the makers of Baaghi 4 that their torture is torture no matter what nomenclature one uses to describe it, the money sunk into the film does reflect in the garish grandeur of the production design and the elaborate staging of the action sequences, which, as anybody would guess, are plentiful. 

Unfortunately, and perhaps expectedly, Baaghi creaks under the weight of the excess that it packs into its 160 minutes of relentless bloodletting. Impalements, dismemberments and bullets through hearts and heads - most of them, mercifully, are kept off camera - are strewn across the film.  

The occasional bare-fist fights give way to all-out brawls in which weapons of all shapes and sizes - machetes, meat-cleavers, swords, hammers and, needless to say, pistols and automatic guns are freely put to use with the aim of granting the protagonist all the thrust and firepower he needs to prove his mettle.  

"Ae idiot, tere dimaag hila hua hain," somebody says to Ronny halfway through a fight.

"Dimaag nahin, dil," he shoots back.

That very exchange is repeated in a flashback - a boy-meets-girl scene that may or may not have actually happened. Enough doubt is sown in the hero's head for him to wonder if he is hallucinating. The doctor tells him as much, as does the policeman. 

But as the paying public, we should have no illusions - Baaghi 4 is strictly for Tiger Shroff fans.